Gail Parry

Review of Darwin Group

Update, Darwin Group have moved their floodlights ...

Update, Darwin Group have moved their floodlights so all four directly face the Environmental Network and our land, obliterating it for bats and wildlife. Bird numbers have crashed because no birds can roost near this site. It is unbelievable destruction.

Original Post
Due to Covid Darwin Group are working 24 hours which is fine, but they have again chosen to wreck a wildlife corridor by putting up a lighting column close to the woodland with two of the four lights aimed at our woodland and the Environmental Network. These are high up, uncowled and angled straight out, lighting up trees that are over 40 feet high from top to bottom all night. Our woodland and orchard is completely lit up. They could remove the two lights lighting up our land, it wouldn't make any difference to their site at all, so why do they persistently light up areas outside their site which they know damages the wildlife in the area? And why are they in the car park when the car park already has lighting facing into the site?

Woodland bats avoid lights. Darwin Group know there are bat roosts in the vicinity of the site. Birds can't roost overnight because they are visible to predators, and the woodland badgers hardly come near their usual feeding areas any more, staying further away from this site. Land I have spent years improving for wildlife is being decimated.

A bat survey was done for Darwin in 2012 and their ecologist said the wildlife corridor must not be lit, nor must the woodland or oak trees in the vicinity of the site. This was backed up by the Council's Planning Ecologist. Planning Conditions on the site stipulate no external lighting be aimed towards the woodland or wildlife corridor. All lighting should also take into account the advice on lighting set out in the Bat Conservation Trust booklet Bats and Lighting in the UK. But they don't have planning consent for this new lighting column and have put up the most damaging lights at the most damaging angles.

Sadly this is nothing new. In 2013 they installed lights they had been told by the Council's planning ecologist they could not use, with one blazing straight towards our bat roost, instead of the lights they had agreed to use. It took at least two months to get them changed.

Earlier in 2012 The Bats Trust and Natural England condemned the assembly building lights, which were installed under permitted development, which lit up the wildlife corridor and the entrance to a bat roost in our loft, blocking the route from our long eared bat maternity roost to the woodland in the middle of summer. I was told the site looked like a football stadium from a mile away. Darwin Group did extinguish the lights and angle them down slightly weeks after Environmental Health got involved, but the only thing protecting part of the wildlife corridor is the leylandii hedge I have put in.

It's sad to see one company causing such damage to woodland and wildlife habitat.